Hekate and the Satanic School

by Tim Maroney (circa 1990, edited 2002)

In the late 1980's I underwent a series of visionary dreams or underworld initiations
in which I performed devotional practices to Hekate and her classical sorceress Medea.
These images were life-changing for me on many levels, and they opened me to spiritual
experiences through ritual that made me a priest.
I considered this vision potential infrastructure for forming a group, since I was
dissatisfied with the occult and pagan group of the time, but I soon found the
experiment unsatisfying and abandoned it. I have abstracted the idea for that group
to a statement of principles of
of the Satanic school, a literary approach to underworld spirituality.
These are principles by which I still live.

Thirty centuries ago, dark crossroads were haunted by Hekate,
earth goddess (or demon) of magic and sorcery. Hekate was far older
than the "classical" gods of the Greeks. She was one of that band of
primeval deities known as Titans who were deposed by the patriarchal
conquerors of the Grecian lands. The myths were rewritten to parallel
politics: the Titans were cast down from Heaven to the pits of
Tartarus by Zeus, the God-King; yet Hekate had always lived there
beneath the ground. Alone of the Titans she retained her status in
later myth. Of the elder goddesses of the region, she was one of many
retained by the invaders, but the only one not reduced to a pretty
ankle and a breeder. Every home in Athens was fronted by an altar to
Hekate: her worship was strongest in the Greek city-state with the
smallest amount of centralized control and with the least power given
over to a King.

Ghost-herding Hekate, with her hair wound with snakes, dogs
howling about her heels, and a guttering torch borne in one hand,
represented a vital current of underworld power too strong for the
force of arms to suppress. Her old Colchian sorceresses, Medea and
Circe, became oddly sympathetic villainesses: their old herbal drugs
were fermented to poisons, their sex magics were retold as child
murders, their shamanistic animal transmutations were reduced to
spells that waylaid careless adventurers; yet as a token of
"respect", each became the lover and helpmate of great heroes
- Jason over Medea, and Odysseus over Circe. Hekate's great
sorceresses were thus degraded more than the goddess herself. In the
West's Middle Ages, these legendary sorceresses became the models of
those most feared women, the witches, and Hekate was degraded to
their unholy Queen. Those dead who were refused the sacraments were
buried at crossroads, where once sacrifices to Hekate were held. And
all without any change in their basic attributes, representing those
qualities sacred to paganism which despots abhor in any hands but
their own :- will, beauty, immortality, knowledge, power,
mystery, ecstasy, love. In middle Christendom all these became
crimes.

In middle and modern times, this current of dark power has come
to be known as "Satanic" by analogy to Satan, the chief demon of the
monotheistic triad. Like Hekate, Satan represents the underworld,
sorcery, and opposition to the ruling gods. Satan's name is the
Hebrew word for "enemy" he is identified with the Serpent that
brought humanity to ruin, and in legend he was cast down to Hell from
Heaven. In the Zoroastrian religion a similar devil was known as
Ahriman, a name which also means "enemy". Zoroastrianism, endorsed
and enforced by the Persian Kings, saw all existence as a war between
Ahura Mazda, the god of light and the Sun, and Ahriman, the dark god
of evil and snakes. The ancient Egyptians feared Set, an earlier form
of Satan, dweller in the demon-haunted land beneath the earth through
which the Sun-King fought his way each night. Set was aided by his
serpentine ally, the monstrous Apep, and a host of magical snakes.
Set had been one of the greatest and most ancient gods of Egypt, but
his people were conquered. For a long while he enjoyed a Hekatean
status as the necessary ruler of the darker aspects of life, and he
was degraded into more and more a demon as time wore on. By the time
of the mythical Exodus, Set was a generic enemy, and glorious tales
of battle became tales of victory of the Sun over Set and his
minions. Just so the early Hebrew scriptures use "satan" as a generic
term for their military enemies in Palestine.

A pattern emerges from the "anti-gods" of history. Time and
again, serpent deities representing both the underworld and magic
have been declared inconvenient and driven from their status by
official violence, figured in myth by a Sun-God who is also the King.
It is not enough to forget them as most deposed deities are
forgotten; they must be demonized.

How does this demonization serve the needs of those in power?
Authority feeds on enmity. The exercise of power is easiest to
justify against an absolutely evil enemy who plainly demands the
strictest opposition. Once this license for power against evil is
obtained by consent of the people, it is easily applied against the
people themselves. Most will never object to the ferreting out of
"agents of evil" in their midst, will indeed gleefully support such a
campaign of persecution. By supporting the authorities they
vicariously exercise the same unfettered power. It is very comforting
to be one of the agents of shining good standing firm against
unimaginable depravity. But reality is not obliging in providing
absolute evils for the use of Kings; all enemies are more
understandable and sympathetic when more is known about their motives
and history. Imaginary enemies do not evoke this difficulty, and once
the belief in imaginary enemies - Satan, the International
Communist Conspiracy, whatever - is established, it is easy to
represent real people as agents of these ultimate enemies. Hekate
would hardly have found a friendly home in Sparta. The common beliefs
about Hekate, Ahriman, Marx, and the rest serve a vital political
purpose.

But why are underworld and sorcerous deities especially
demonized? Officialdom is chiefly opposed to the individual will: the
power that authority delights in exercising is the power of imposing
its will on others. The opposition to this authoritarian will is the
individual fount of creativity and unpredictability. In psychology,
this fount is called the unconscious mind, the obscure and unseen
intelligence which motivates us all to seek our own paths. The
unconscious mind, the dark side of the psyche, is the symbolic
meaning of the mythical underworld or "Hell." Tyrants are right to
fear this deep well of power and to frighten their subjects away from
it. Sorcery is a symbol of independent action, unauthorized and
unregulable, obeying only the laws of the dark side and scorning the
workings of temporal power. Tyrants who believe in its "magical"
power fear it for pragmatic reasons, but these mundane concerns
reflect the nature of the sorcerous myth. The individual sorceress
could, like Medea, shatter the structures of authority if they became
intolerably alienating. Sorcery is the mythological face of art. All
good artists are sorcerors; spell-weavers; subversives; Satanists.

The veneration of demons is not, as is commonly believed, the
"worship of evil", but an escape from the authoritarian mentality of
"us vs. them", of allies and enemies, of repressive and arbitrary
regulations expressed for power itself rather than for the general
interest, of good and evil as absolute forces in the world rather
than as subjective judgments applied to human behavior. All these
naive or corrupt political influences are banished from the
crossroads at twilight by the irresistible, but subtle, influence of
Hekate, snake-woman, Medea's muse, friend and mistress of the hounds
of Hell; they are cracked and ruined by this sorceress behind and
beyond all sorcery.

Among the major exponents of this "Satanism" or "Diabolism"
have been poets and playwrights, musicians and magicians: such as
Rabelais, Blake, Shelley, Baudelaire, Swinburne, Shaw, Crowley, and
(most recently) Galas. Hekatean Satanists or Luciferians today have an
interest in continuing and expanding on this tradition, known as
the"Satanic school" in the Oxford English Dictionary, without
dogmatically adhering to any one creator's conception of it.

The symbol of the crossroads is significant beyond its Hekatean
correspondence (but in ways that reflect on that symbolism).
Conventional magical orders, covens, and the like, teach a path, a
sequence of initiations or similar steps, more or less fixed in
structure and adapted little if at all to the individual. The Satanic
school is instead a meeting of paths, an intersection of ways: yet
a particular meeting point, a crossroad sacred to Hekate, rather than
a union of all paths. There may be those people whose roads do not
touch this crossroad, but we welcome meetings with them at other
intersections; and we remind them (and ourselves) that Hekate may
live even where she is not at once apparent.

The Hekatean or Satanic school is expressed in
poetry, theatre, music, magic, and other arts.
It makes no promises of magical powers, exalted
spiritual degrees, contact and contract with discorporate beings, nor
simple answers to difficult questions. Nor does it forbid its students
from asserting such powers, degrees, contacts, or answers.

They are free to believe what they
will, but they must scrutinize their beliefs to avoid
dogmatism and folly.

They are free to behave as they will,
but they are expected to monitor their actions to avoid disrespect
for their own interests and the interests of others.

The underworld current opposes all restriction of human rights
on grounds of race, gender, national origin,
social class, sexual preference, religion, and creed. Yet it holds
that those demonized have the right to assemble in private and to
keep their own counsel.

Hekatean symbolism should not be
taken as a mandate of literal belief in such a being, or in any
spiritual being. Nor must the use of the symbolism of sorcery be
taken as mandating a belief in the "paranormal" or extrapsychological
powers of the black arts. Such matters are left to the individual
judgment of members.

Rituals of initiation, meditation, invocation, celebration, and
so forth may be sponsored by students of the Satanic school for the artistic and spiritual
benefit of all assembled. In all such rituals, the widest possible latitude of beliefs
is to be embraced, so that no one should feel excluded because of the
integrity of their intellectual conscience. Rituals and other works
are to avoid all definite
statements of belief or disbelief in such matters as the primacy of a
certain artistic movement or the reality of spiritual beings and
psychic powers. Private assemblies may be
composed only of those who share an opinion on certain matters.

All hierarchy is suspect. The Satanic school stands firmly
against all abuses of power, all attempts to reduce living beings to
positions in an organizational chain, all stamping of people with
formal estimates of merit, all dehumanization and forced conformity.

The Satanic school has no doctrines other than those intended to
guarantee the freedom of its students and of all people.

The Satanic school harbors various assemblies, or special
interest groups, dedicated to particular shared interests within the
school. These may perform or create artistic projects, or they may form research
groups, social groups, informal discussion groups not explicitly
devoted to any particular project.

Students who share particular opinions may work
together on projects dependent on those conditions. For instance, a
group dedicated to atheism and to the freeing of members' minds from
all belief in literal gods might fall under the aegis of
the Satanic school, but it might also be
incapable of meainingfully including students who believes in
literal gods. Similarly, a group especially dedicated to occult
spellcasting intended to work effects at a distance could hardly
benefit from the presence of skeptics. And likewise for the reverse
of these opinions.

Assemblies may draw their doctrinal basis more
narrowly than The Satanic school as a whole, but they must deal
with their differences from other opinions as disagreements among
reasonable people, rather than a special handle on the absolute truth
which renders them the denizens of Olympus and others the denizens of
Hell. Assemblies with apparently contradictory beliefs should appoint
liasons to each other and encourage dialog, but they should not shy
away from argument as if intellectual competition were some
unthinkable poison or rudeness.

Allowing doctrine in assemblies should not be taken as a
license for dogmatism. Limits on opinion must be as unrestrictive
as possible given the mission of the assembly and the nature of its
shared interest. An assembly should be so arranged that persons
not sharing the assembly's common opinions would not be
interested in joining its projects.

Initiation is not required of any student of the Satanic school, though it may
be required for membership in a particular assembly.

No initiation ritual shoudl be interpreted by the student
as conferring any intrinsic spiritual
superiority over those who have not taken the degree. Such rituals
represent a personal progress along a particular path of artistic or
spiritual refinement.

The Satanic school encourages its students to join any and all
religious, spiritual or artistic groups which seem fit to them.
Join any but set none upon Olympus, just as in the pagan mystery
traditions of ancient Rome.

All groups should expect reasonable
criticism from students of the Satanic school. This criticism is a vital and important
function of its values; while not childishly seeking to hurt relations
with other groups, neither should students fail to
respect their own interests in free intellectual
exercise by unduly restricting the scope of their critical comments.

Despite its orientation towards the Titans and Satan, the
Satanic school has no fixed doctrine about Classical Greek mythology,
nor towards Christianity or the other monotheistic
religions. A person holding any of these traditions in high regard
should not feel constrained by that opinion against studying in
the Satanic school. Just as it is by no means obvious that a modern
Christian must oppose Buddhism simply because it teaches that God is
deluded, neither is it clear that a freethinking Christian must
oppose the redeemed symbolism of Hekate or Satan merely because
these are demons of their tradition. Modern Christian individuals
and groups which share the Satanic school's distaste for dogma and
repression may be of the Devil's party already.

The Satanic school is critical of many temporal authorities. All
governments to date are flawed by authoritarianism and
narrow-mindedness. The right to criticize is one of the most cherished values
of the Satanic school. Medea overthrew the rulers of
Corinth through her sorcerous knowledge, not by staging a coup. In
Hekatean symbolism, sorcery indicates art, craft and knowledge,
not the force of arms.

Students of the Satanic school may refuse to recognize laws which
stand in contravention to the rights of artistic and religious
freedom, and freedom of thought and privacy, such as restrictions
against sexual practices between consenting and sexually mature
persons and against the voluntary consumption of
consciousness-altering drugs. From the prehistoric past through the
present, many cultures have incorporated both sex and drugs into
religious and artistic practices, and it has credibly been argued by
some scholars that all religion derives from them. Religious
prostitution and sacramental drugs have been common mysteries of
pagan religion from before the start of recorded history, and strong
traces of both remain in the myths of monotheism as well. Students of
the Satanic school and all people have, by the freedom of thought and of religion,
the right to study the spirituality of entheogens and eroticism.
No government or
other agency has the right to interfere in these sacred practices.
Medea and Circe had mastered every form of magic drug and
herb, and of the arts of love; we would be untrue to their legend
were we to turn away from their wisdom for mere political
convenience in the short term.

These writings on Hekate represent
my thoughts and feelings from the late 1980's.
While these are still the principles I live by, my Hekatean studies have moved forward.
In the future I will integrate Hekate's Neo-Platonic
and theurgical functions from later classical times, and more elements
of ancient Greek magic. Hekate and the Satanic School is based largely
on the oft-told Jason and Medea story and on Hesiod's Theogony.